The real meaning of allotments | David Boyle

They look back to a great golden age of agrarian independence and equality, based on the rights to land, swept away in a great Original Sin – whether it was the Norman Conquest, the Enclosures, the Dissolution of the Monasteries or the Industrial Revolution. They urge a return to those peasant values of thrift and independence, based on a programme borrowing from the best of Medieval economics – whether it is common land, the guild system or the concept of the Just Price. They share a bitter scepticism about the conventional values of wealth, power and money, and the delusions of money as a measure of value. They blame the division between rich and poor on urban greed, the manipulation of money, and the theft from the poor of the means of livelihood on the land. They peddle an alternative interpretation of wealth: that creative human life, lived with work and life in harmo...